"Mr White said Europe's creditors are likely to face some of the
biggest haircuts. European banks have already admitted to $1 trillion of
non-performing loans: they are heavily exposed to emerging markets and
are almost certainly rolling over further bad debts that have never been
disclosed.
The European banking system may have to be
recapitalized on a scale yet unimagined, and new "bail-in" rules mean
that any deposit holder above the guarantee of €100,000 will have to
help pay for it.
The warnings have special resonance since Mr
White was one of the very few voices in the central banking fraternity
who stated loudly and clearly between 2005 and 2008 that Western finance
was riding for a fall, and that the global economy was susceptible to a
violent crisis.
Mr White said stimulus from quantitative easing and zero rates by the big central banks after the Lehman crisis
leaked out across east Asia and emerging markets, stoking credit
bubbles and a surge in dollar borrowing that was hard to control in a
world of free capital flows.
The result is that these countries
have now been drawn into the morass as well. Combined public and private
debt has surged to all-time highs to 185pc of GDP in emerging markets
and to 265pc of GDP in the OECD club, both up by 35 percentage points
since the top of the last credit cycle in 2007."

Tuesday, 19 January 2016

Two 4 hr charts....a bull flag in gold and a bear flag in the Dax ? I'm still wary of a sharp reversal in the stock indices but not really feeling it yet....meanwhile that lower BB line seems like possible support

again 1080 stands out as important support

closing back above the lower horizontal line in the Dax would be bullish

Abby Martin interviews retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson,
former national security advisor to the Reagan administration, who spent
years as an assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell during both
Bush administrations. Today, he is honest about the unfixable corruption
inside the establishment and the corporate interests driving foreign
policy.

Hear a rare insider's view of what interests are behind
U.S. wars, the manipulation of intelligence, the intertwining of the
military and corporate world, and why the U.S. Empire is doomed.

"Price discovery is not a sexy function of markets, but it is critical
to the efficient allocation of scarce capital and resources, and to the
preservation of the long term wealth of investors and the economy as a
whole. If price discovery is compromised by manipulation, then we will
all be gradually impoverished and the economy will be imbalanced and
unstable."

London Banker, Lies, Damn Lies, and Libor

"Delivery takes on a note of finality, of a reckoning, when the
available supply has become rehypothecated into little more than a
digital entry and a state of mind. The unanswered call for delivery
begins the final lifting of the veil."

Sunday, 10 January 2016

Saturday, 9 January 2016

"What message
was the market sending in 2015? To me, it was playing out an epic
tug-of-war battle between the inflationary effects of the Fed's
'stimulus' machinery and the growing deflationary forces as reflected in
falling commodity prices. This battle is entirely expected in an ending
drama of a super-long bull market that really started after WWII when
central banks started throwing their weight around.

Pundits are bullish – but I still think tech’s in a bubble

At this time of the year, the MSM is full of pundits prognosticating
about 2016 – and I note that many are quite bullish on the global
economy, and especially Europe. Most are even bullish on the US tech
leaders, the famous FANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google),
which buoyed the indexes last year.

But as a warning that the economy is not the stock market, recall that
in the 1990s bubble, the 12 leading tech shares lead by Microsoft, Dell,
Cisco and Intel, saw their valuation balloon from $900 billion to $4
trillion in the four years to the 2000 top. They then collapsed to less
than $900 billion in the next decade – all the while their sales and
revenues continued to grow! The tech economy was up, yet stocks went
down. Let that be a lesson to investors and traders alike."

"Western ‘democracy’ is only in the past tense.
Imperfect as it was, it’s gone now. The only remaining vestige of it is a
ceaseless ongoing PR campaign. How long will the Western publics
continue to believe it?"

Saturday, 2 January 2016

The Ftse250 has been a much better performer than its larger cousin,the Ftse100,which has more exposure to mining and oil,and less growth stock exposure. Can we now count a completed 5 wave bull market,finished on June 3rd last year at 18393 ?

Gann enthusisasts will notice how if you take 12000 as the 2007 high and add 50% you get 18000 for a possible 8 year high-high cycle,with an intervening 4 year high in 2011